Book review: “The Empty Hours: The Cases of the 87th Precinct” by Ed McBain

Ed McBain makes the point in his 1962 book The Empty Hours: The Cases of the 87th Precinct that there are no mysteries in police work. Which is to say that there are no brilliant sleuths like Hercule Poirot solving perfect crimes by lawless masterminds.

Policemen hate mystery stories because they recognize in them a control that is lacking in their own very real, sometimes routine, sometimes spectacular, sometimes tedious investigation of a case. It is very nice and very clever and very convenient to have all the pieces fit together neatly.

But that’s not the way it works with cops.

McBain is engaging in a sort of literary jujitsu here because he spent a half century writing about the police detectives in the 87^th Precinct in an unnamed city very much like New York — and the mysteries they had to solve.

From 1956 to 2005, McBain cranked out 55 installments in the 87^th Precinct story, and, in each one, detectives such as Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer had to figure out the who, what, when, where and why of one or more crimes. Most of the time, they were pretty successful.

Rarely was there anything hinting at a locked-room puzzle or any idea that by use of their “gray cells” Carella, Meyer and the others would be able to crack a case. Those weren’t the mysteries that the 87^th Precinct cops investigated, nor were they the mysteries McBain wrote about.

 

Giving weight and substance

His books are called procedurals. They focus on the procedures that the police men and women use in determining what sort of crime has occurred and who is responsible.

But that isn’t why McBain had such a successful career with his 87^th Precinct books. (He had a similarly successful parallel career as the writer of more literary novels under his legal name, Evan Hunter, as well as a host of titles under various pseudonyms.)

McBain’s 87^th Precinct books worked so well — and sold so well — because the author was able to give weight and substance to the people who were the squadroom cops as well as to the people who were the victims, criminals, eyewitnesses and bystanders in their cases.

Consider one of the squadroom detectives:

Detective Cotton Hawes was a tea drinker. He had picked up the habit from his minister father, the man who’d named him after Cotton Mather, the last of the red-hot Puritans. In the afternoons, the good Reverend Jeremiah Hawes had entertained members of his congregation, serving tea and cakes that his wife Matilda baked in the old, iron kitchen oven…

Tonight, he sat in the grubby, shopworn comfort of the 87^th Precinct squadroom and drank, from a cardboard container, the tea Alf Miscolo had prepared in the clerical office. It was hot tea. That was about the most he could say of it.

 

“The whys in police work”

McBain’s The Empty Hours: The Cases of the 87th Precinct, the 15^th book in the series, is a collection of three novellas, each 70 to 80 pages long:

• “The Empty Hours,” which opens with the body of a young woman, so decomposed that they “thought she was colored at first,” and involves a drowning, a haircut and a pile of French francs.
• “ ‘J’ ,” which starts with the discovery of a murdered rabbi, splashed by white and blue paint and covered in red blood, and involves the letter “J” scrawled on the wall, presumably by an anti-Semite who ran out of time to write his message.
• “Storm,” which opens with Cotton Hawes and a 37-year-old girl friend named Blanche Colby, a veteran of 22 years in show business as a dancer, heading to a skiing vacation, and involves the brutal murders of two young female ski instructors and Hawes locked up in handcuffs for a time.

In each case, the crimes committed are a combination of greed, happenstance, strong emotions, opportunity and all the other aspects of human life, not a puzzle except in the way that each and every person is a puzzle.

There are only whys in police work, but they do not add up to mystery. They add up to work, and nobody in the world likes work. The bulls of the 87^th would have preferred to sit on their backsides and sip at gin and tonics, but the whys were there, so they put on their hats and their holsters and tried to find some becauses.

 

The questions

In “The Empty Hours,” the question is: Why was $5,000 unaccounted for in the bank accounts of Claudia Davis?

In “ ‘J’ ,” it is: How did the anti-Semite who was the prime suspect in the killing of the rabbi end up on his kitchen floor with his throat cut?

In “Storm,” it is the phrase Hawes keeps repeating to himself as he interviews one of the ski lodge staff: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?”

The study of human nature is all questions. That’s the reality that McBain tapped into again and again in writing about his squadroom cops and everyone they dealt with.

Their hard work, persistence and inquisitiveness lead the 87^th Precinct detectives to the arrests they make. And they make McBain’s long-running series of procedurals a rich and textured literary pleasure.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.22.26